It feels a little like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, adapted for the Premier League. A quarter of the way through the season, four managers have already been sacked. Booting out managers does work - just not for the reasons people think. Teams who sack their managers do enjoy a short-term uplift in their results. But this doesn’t have anything to do with the new managers. Managers are not only sacked when their teams are at a low-ebb. They also tend to be sacked when their teams are being extraordinarily unlucky. The football consultancy 21st Club analysed the points earned by teams in the big five European leagues in the eight games before and after sacking a manager. In the eight games before a manager leaves, the team averages 0.8 points per game. In the eight subsequent matches, they average 1.2 points per game - a clear improvement. But based on expected goals - the quality and quantity of chances created and conceded - the team actually ‘deserved’ 1.2 points per game in the eight points before the manager left, exactly the same as they actually got under their new boss.

So what really changes with the new manager isn’t their new tactics or motivational team talks. It’s simply that they don’t suffer from the old manager’s bad luck. Except, if a struggling manager is persisted with, the team’s luck improves anyway - and their results improve by as much as if they had been sacked. That’s why, on average, Premier League sackings make no difference at all to a team’s performance, as a study of Premier League sackings from 2000-2015 found. Comparing under-performing teams who sacked their managers after a terrible run to those clubs who kept their managers after the same dire form, the group of Dutch academics showed that results improve, and by the same amount, regardless of whether or not the manager is sacked. Studies of other leagues have shown the same.

At West Ham Moyes will need his capacity for delusion more than ever

The ‘managerial bounce’ is a chimera: this phantom bounce is nothing more than regression to the mean. On average, an in-season replacement of the manager has zero effect on performances, either during the season or in the long run. This isn’t to say that managers can’t make a difference at all. It’s just that you have to be an exceptionally good or bad manager to do so, and the overwhelming majority of managers are bunched in the middle, where replacing one with another will statistically have no more impact than fans starting to go to games in a pair of lucky socks. In English football from 1973 to 2010, Stefan Szymanski found, only 10 per cent of top-flight managers consistently overachieved when wages were taken into account. And panic-stricken teams who sack their managers after a couple of dodgy deflections in mid-season hardly have their pick of the elite 10 per cent. Instead, unless they are prepared to spend a lot poaching another club’s manager - and most teams either aren’t, or don’t have the means to - they are left fishing in the pool of unemployed managers.

Most are unemployed for a very good reason: they are not elite. New research from Szymanski and a team of economists finds that, in English football, clubs who have just sacked a manager tend to replace them with a “low talented, experienced” replacement. In a quarter of cases, the new manager actually has a lower estimated ability than their predecessors. So much managerial tinkering is churn for churn’s sake, without clubs giving any proper regard to whether the new boss will genuinely be any better than the old boss. Sometimes a club’s manager may indeed be mediocre; sometimes they should still be retained, for all the plausible alternatives are even worse. Why, then, does the never-ending cycle continue? The reasons go well beyond football. 90 per cent of drivers believe they are above average: humans are not very good at realistic self-assessment. This illusory superiority permeates football too: owners and fans are often incapable of seeing where their team really stands, rather than where they would like it to. The sobering truth is that, as Soccernomics shows, there is a 90 per cent correlation between teams’ wages and their results.

Clubs also misinterpret randomness. Because football is a low-scoring game, results hinge more on chance than other sports. Who wins a football game is determined by 50 per cent skill and 50 per cent luck, Chris Anderson and David Sally explain in The Numbers Game, largely because about half of all goals occur after a moment of fortune - ball deflections, lucky bounces, a bad decision from a referee, or even the impact of a stray balloon left on the pitch. And the football season also has comparatively few games - each Premier League teams plays under half as many league games as NBA teams and under a quarter as many as MLB teams - so judgements are made on a comparatively small sample size. Add in the grave financial consequences of relegation from the Premier League, and you have a cocktail of endless, debilitating short-termism. None of this is to suggest that all managers should be bullet-proof. Some sackings really are justified. West Ham, for instance, are 18th on 21st Club’s expected goals model this year, after an underwhelming 2016/17 season, suggesting that sympathy for Slaven Bilic should be limited.

Yet the broader point remains. The median length of an English football manager is only a year. Most of these sackings “are undeserved - they are overrated solutions” as Omar Chaudhuri, head of football intelligence at 21st Club, observes. Working as a consultant to clubs, 21st Club have helped stop managers getting the chop unfairly, by showing that poor results were down to bad luck, not a dramatic decline in underlying performances. Where there is market inefficiency so there lies opportunity for those who recognise it. Rather than be seduced by the Fool’s Gold of incessantly changing their manager, clubs who splurge so much cash on sackings would be better off instead investing in areas - scouting, youth coaching or improving facilities - where it could actually make a difference.

Whoever had took over from Caldwell we would still be in the same predicament as we are now. If a team is in the bottom two of L2 its going to be very very difficult to attract players to come and play for you. We should have looked at trying to bring in experienced players instead of bringing in youth players from Championship clubs. If or when we get relegated its not going to look good is it for the youth players who will go back to their parent clubs, as the parent clubs will ask them how did you do? and if they reply "Oh we got relegated", then the parent clubs are going to think if there not good enough or cut out for L2 then they won't be good enough or cut out for the Championship and they will end up getting released and they will go into non-league and then eventually come back to L2 possibly L1 when they are older or they will fall out of the game altogether. You see it in football all the time.

The other big question is if Jack left or was sacked, who would replace him? Because I can't think of anyone.

Also look at Plymouth who were in the relegation zone just before Christmas they could have sacked the manager but they didn't they stuck by him and he turned it around and Plymouth are now in the playoff places and have a real chance of getting back to back promotion to the Championship, something we could have done in 2015!

I still believe there is a bounce factor in that when a new man comes in there is invariably a short term uplift in form and results.
So here is the scenario ,Jack loses his next 3 games or loses more ground on those above ,do we stick with him and resign ourselves to almost certain relegation ,or do we bring an experienced man in and hope we can have that sufficient upturn for the last 8 games .
Like I said before, the 'board' are rubbish at making the right decision, but maybe bringing someone like Ronnie Moore until the end of the season either as adviser or manager might just kick start the season .One things for sure ,if we do lose the next 3 games we either need to change something or we throw the towel in .

Blue, I know you are an eternal optimist but we (or DA to be more precise) threw the towel in 2 years ago. Since then we have been on a downward spiral that any manager would struggle to turn around. Until Allen, his family and cohorts depart we will continue to go down even lower.
I know you disagree but Wilson was our best hope of holding things together. Ok it wasn't pretty but he got the results without any budget to keep us out of the Lge1 drop zone and I firmly believe he would have kept us up. He knew what was required and targeted the games he thought we could win. From that point on, our fate was sealed. The disaster that was Caldwell reduced gates, reduced revenue alienated fans and left our board with no choice other than to appoint the fans champion to try and turn fortunes around. That has failed big style. Lester has proved he cant cope with it.
We are down and will not avoid relegation, just face the facts, we are 6 points adrift of safety with some very tough games coming up. Some of them against teams who are scrapping for their lives. We have proved we cant scrap and just don't want to. If teams don't roll over and play dead we don't stand a chance. Our only chance of survival is COG realizes he is supposed to be a football player who plays in front of a goal and tries his best to put the ball between the 2 uprights and under that there crossbar thingy and somehow scores 12 in the last 8 games, because COG is going to be our No1 striker for those games. Now if that doesn't knock your optimism, I don't know what will.

I have to agree that we are already down. I also agree Jack's job was extraordinarily difficult and that even recruitment was likely to be a problem with the club in such a perilous state .......... but the evidence so far that of ten players recruited none is showing real form is more than disconcerting. I honestly think if you'd let me recruit ten non-leaguers to supplement our squad two or three would have been successes by now. If they'd have let any of you pick from EFL players wanting to move, don't you think you'd have done better than Jack too? I do.

With the right support Jack could take us back into the league, despite this season's failure, but as Dancing points out we started throwing away our league status when we didn't finance Danny. He made mistakes, but so do all managers. Jack would need the backing Danny never had and upon which neither Saunders, nor GC could properly rely either. The manager almost always needs a functioning club behind him - short-term a manager can occasionally succeed despite the club, but eventually either the club will pull the manager down, or the club will come together to meet the manager's aspirations. Though I'd like to sack Tommy Wright, a much more effective option would be massive changes behind the scenes.

Next season we will have dramatically reduced income with cut price season tickets and less hospitality along with takings on the concourse. Allen will still have his fingers in the pie so the chunk of wages in the accounts for payments to his "family" which nobody on the board can account for will still be a drain (last years wages increased by £2mill but the player budget was hardly increased).
The net result will be reduced player budgets but because we have so many of the current squad retained next year on high wages, we will be left with another year of struggle and strife against big imposing teams. It isn't going to get any better anytime soon.

The players Danny Wilson had were much better than the ones we have now for whatever reason and the fact that we lost 8 league games in a row under him still rankles with me .How anyone can defend that is beyond me .
I'm getting to that situation with Jack , we have had horrible losing runs again and the buck has to stop with him I'm afraid.
The teams he is putting out recently are without doubt some of the the worst town line ups I have ever seen and we have had some bad ones in the last 40 years.

Caldwell will go down in history as the worst Chesterfield manager ever, unless we get an ever worse one in the foreseeable future.

Looking at that Matt maybe we should have stuck with Saunders !!!!

(14-03-2018, 01:31)bluepooch Wrote: The players Danny Wilson had were much better than the ones we have now for whatever reason and the fact that we lost 8 league games in a row under him still rankles with me .How anyone can defend that is beyond me .
I'm getting to that situation with Jack , we have had horrible losing runs again and the buck has to stop with him I'm afraid.
The teams he is putting out recently are without doubt some of the the worst town line ups I have ever seen and we have had some bad ones in the last 40 years.

Blue Danny Wilson had a squad of players he inherited from Saunders with some bad injuries and a useless lump of a forward who by all accounts caused a lot of trouble in the dressing room. The board backed him up by selleing anything that moved of vaue and tied his hands budget wise. His loan signings were nowhere near as bad as Caldwells and Lesters and he kept us in Lge1 one season and would have done it again. If Lee had been fit and available we wouldn't have had many of the defeats you moan about. Our goalkeeping was poor to say the least. I honestly don't remember us ever losing 8 in a row under him but am sure you will remind me.

The trouble with Dean Saunders as a manager has been that he did reasonably well in every job, began to deteriorate and hit a tailspin from which he has never once recovered. The stats he achieves depend on how quick you sack him. Certainly the team he passed on to Danny did not look totally incapable on paper. I don't think anyone would argue that though Danny appeared to have the right aims, like in signing Liddle he looked to have found just the kind of player we needed till we saw him, his playing legacy to GC was certainly no better than he had started with himself. However, the demolition derby really started with GC's new young broom approach which resulted in the destruction of what little we had and its replacement with nothing.

Now we have once again won the race to the bottom, perhaps someone will alert Mr Allen to the truth behind Dancing's assessment. Unless we can find ways to off-load some of our higher-paid players, bring in cheaper, potentially successful players anxious to climb the pyramid and develop our own young players properly ....... there are several clubs in the National League likely to overpower us both on and off the field. If Macclesfield and Boreham Wood for example were the two promoted teams this season, that would leave a division populated by several potential EFL clubs with very real ambitions to get there ahead of us. And once you fail to get back, getting back and even retaining Vanarama status gets steadily harder.